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SUMMARY:The effect of nutritional status on historical infectious disease 
 morbidity: evidence from the London Foundling Hospital\, 1892-1915 - Eric 
 Schneider (LSE)
DTSTART:20210428T120000Z
DTEND:20210428T130000Z
UID:TALK159010@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:31344
DESCRIPTION:There is a complex inter-relationship between nutrition and mo
 rbidity in human health. Many diseases reduce nutritional status\, but on 
 the other hand\, having low nutritional status is also known to make indiv
 iduals more susceptible to certain diseases and to experience more serious
  illness. Modern evidence on these relationships\, determined after the in
 troduction of antibiotics and vaccines\, may not be applicable to historic
 al settings before these medical technologies were available. Thus\, this 
 paper uses historical data from the London Foundling Hospital to determine
  the causal effect of nutritional status of children proxied by weight and
  height-for-age Z-scores on the odds of contracting five infectious diseas
 es (measles\, mumps\, rubella\, chicken pox and whooping cough) and on sic
 kness duration from these diseases. I identify a causal effect by exploiti
 ng the randomisation of environmental conditions as foundling children wer
 e removed from their original home\, then fostered with families in counti
 es nearby London and later returned to the Foundling Hospital’s main sit
 e in London. I find no effect of nutritional status on the odds of contrac
 ting the five diseases\, but I do find a historically important and statis
 tically significant effect of nutritional status on sickness duration for 
 measles and mumps but not for the other diseases. These findings confirm t
 he importance of underlying nutritional status for measles morbidity\, pro
 vide new evidence of an effect for mumps\, but challenge earlier assertion
 s that whooping cough morbidity was related to nutritional status. These r
 esults suggest that improving nutritional status in the late nineteenth an
 d twentieth centuries would have reduced the severity (and perhaps case fa
 tality rate) of measles and mumps infections\, whereas the decline in pert
 ussis mortality before vaccination was likely caused by other factors.
LOCATION: Zoom webinar - link to follow
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